Twitter – trends and incidence

This past weekend, I wrote a quick tool that estimates the incidence of certain words within the twitter stream using just a single search, not polling for weeks of data as some of my other tools do. This makes it pretty easy to look at a term like “flu” several times a day, discovering that flu-centric tweets have represented between 1.5% and 3% of all tweets for the past couple of days.

Twitter just overhauled its web interface, and added an interesting feature – terms that are trending. This information has been available in third-party tools for some time, but now it’s only one click to see what people are saying about #therescue.

Makes sense. Showing the ten most popular terms on Twitter would likely be extremely boring – my guess is that “lunch”, “dinner” and “sleep” would dominate. (It’s evening here on the east coast of the US, and “dinner” is currently appearing in roughly 0.6% of tweets.) Much more interesting to show terms or tags that are higher now than they were an hour or a week ago… It’s interesting, though – do we read a list like this as a list of most popular topics, even if we know that there’s two orders of magnitude more interest in Swine Flu than in The Inbetweeners?

And then, of course, there’s the potential for using these terms to gain attention. Like this wonderful tweet from Beau Wade, demonstrating that the author clearly has his/her finger on the pulse of the planet. Or a particular subcommunity of wealthy, wired, worried people on that planet.

One Response to Twitter – trends and incidence

the one thing which should concern world health organizations is the 100%chance that something like H1N1 will repeat itself. We are not only warehousing swine, but anything we devour – we stick into factories – absolute perfect breeding grounds for a new virus. The chance is heightened by daily immunizations to prevent known diseases. This strengthens the resistance of a new virus to any known means.
Tighten your seat belts. Changing the way we house animals we eat would be one step in the right direction.
As a species, we are quite arrogant and careless. We walk with a heavy foot print, instead treading with respect of the other creatures of this planet. I’m expect we will pay for this carelessness.